“It’s breathtaking. That is disqualifying right there. To say you don’t know about the Ku Klux Klan? You don’t know about David Duke?” the co-host said during the opening segment of the show after remarking upon Trump’s feigned ignorance of the group and Duke during an interview with CNN on Sunday, two days after he explicitly disavowed the group in a news conference.

The “most stunning thing” about the latest development, said Scarborough, a southerner himself, is that the latest maneuver “isn’t buying him a single vote.”

“I mean is he really so stupid that he thinks Southerners aren’t offended by the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke? Is he really so ignorant of Southern voters that he thinks this is the way to their heart — to go neutral, to play Switzerland when you’re talking about the Klan?” Scarborough asked. “And to say he doesn’t know enough information about the Klan to condemn them — exactly what does Donald Trump expect to learn in the next 24 hours about the Klan.”

Scarborough published an op-ed in The Washington Post to that effect on Monday morning, asking whether “this how the party of Abraham Lincoln dies?” Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski, who have been accused of cozying up to Trump, were adamant in their disgust for the candidate throughout the first hour of the show.

What Trump did was more than wrong, it was weird, which can be worse in a presidential election. There are numerous examples (Syrian refugees, terror watch list gun bans, attacking Scalia on racial preferences) of Trump reacting to a question about a news item with an awful answer. But this time he had it right on Friday and then horribly wrong on Sunday.

This is political incorrectness run amok. Political correctness is the perversion of fairness, justice, and civility. That doesn’t make basic fairness, justice, and civility bad things. This was not a hard question.

He should have dealt with this the way Reagan did: “They may be endorsing me, but I’m not endorsing them.”

He didn’t shoot anyone on Fifth Avenue, but this is pretty close. We have to ask again whether (a) he’s serious about being president or (b) he’s a Dem plant.

He’s as faithful to conservative principles as Bill is to Hillary, and when President Trump rethinks everything he has said during the campaign after moving into the soon-to-be-fabulous White House, his followers stand a fair chance of finding that they are now the blue dress.

Still, my assessment is that if he is nominated (which I think is no done deal for several reasons, like his pummeling in the recent debate) we are slightly better off with him than with one of the Dems – and his huge margins among women and Hispanics throw shade on the hope-over-experience notion that Trump can’t beat Hillary. I think he’ll beat her like a drum, and the amusement value of this bizarrely-coiffed charlatan driving the brownshirted liberal church lady nuts would almost be worth the risk to our Republic. But those who assess the danger of a President Trump as too great, well, you’ll get no argument from me.

In 2012, I undertook the thankless task of trying to convince rabid libertarians that they were better off voting for Romney than remaining pure and in their basements. I was convinced I was right, and I was, in fact, right. But don’t look for me to chide my principled conservative friends like Rick Wilson and Erick Erickson when they sit out Election Day. This is a strategic disagreement, and I can’t say their strategy is too far off to be valid. Trump is not a conservative, and that’s reason enough to shun him.

Trump has the potential to be a disaster of epic proportions. I’d vote for him as the nominee only because neither of the Democrats has the potential not to be. But if that’s not enough for you to support him, well, I won’t tell you you’re wrong. And besides, if he’s nominated, I’ll be too busy stockpiling food and fortifying my rural apocalypse compound to try to convince you otherwise.

I’ve read a counterargument: Hillary! and gridlock is better than Trump and compromise.

Sunday, 28 February 2016

He’s trying to make a big deal out of his “You’re not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency” remark to Trump the other night. Trump might not be able to do that, but the sincere impotence of that remark is not going to stop him. As Cruz showed us with the Maniac video, you have to defeat him at his own game.

Just off the top of my head, “Don Rickles called, he wants his shtick back” would have been better.

And today Marco Rubio responded to a heckler who called him an empty suit: “It wasn’t made in Mexico; it’s not a Trump suit.” He identified another as the “valedictorian of Trump University.” At long last.

It now seems clear that across this country Republicans are angry. They are speaking out and we have heard their voices.

We have heard their voices and they are telling us that they are sick and tired of a Republican establishment that is dominated by wealthy donors, and so they’ve decided to cut out the middle man and just nominate the wealthy donor themselves.

We have heard their voices and they are telling us that they’re angry at a party that doesn’t care about the working class out in flyover country, and so they’ve decided to nominate a born millionaire from New York City.

We have heard their voices and they are telling us that they are angry about the values of evangelicals being ignored, and so they’ve decided to nominate a man who praises the abortion mill Planned Parenthood, cheats on his wives, runs casinos, calls for violence against those who oppose him and curses like a sailor.

We have heard their voices, and they are telling us they are angry at Washington D.C.’s war on the middle class and so they’ve decided to nominate a man whose tax proposal favors the wealthy.

We have heard their voices and they are angry at the lack of virility in our national discourse, and so they have decided to nominate a whining bully boy who sends his lawyers to try to silence those who say mean things about him.

We have heard their voices and they are tired of the lies of political correctness, and so they have decided to nominate a man who can lie without any kind of correctness at all.

Republicans are angry. They are speaking out and we have heard their voices.

Two female celebrities in recent weeks have made the headlines (and been hailed as heroes) for actions that may actually set women back.

The first headline-generating celebrity was “Harry Potter” actress Emma Watson, who announced last week that she is taking a year off acting to focus on feminism. Watson hasn’t starred in anything major since the “Harry Potter” series concluded in 2011, so her announcement seems less like a selfless move and more like a cry for attention before she fades into obscurity.

Taking a break from acting is a perfectly acceptable choice; taking that time off to focus on feminism seems counterproductive. As at least one person noted on Twitter, Watson would do more for the advancement of women if she took a year off to get a degree in engineering.

You see, Watson’s choice to leave her main source of income and focus on something that will most likely not earn her millions of dollars, is the reason there’s a gender wage gap in this country. Feminists like to insinuate that the gap is due to discrimination, but it’s not. The gap is mostly due to women making the choice to focus on family or select careers that don’t pay as well as the careers men choose.

I’m put in mind of what the Woody Allen character was told in Stardust Memories:

Sandy Bates: But shouldn’t I stop making movies and do something that counts, like-like helping blind people or becoming a missionary or something?

Voice of Martian: Let me tell you, you’re not the missionary type. You’d never last. And-and incidentally, you’re also not Superman; you’re a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes.

Is Donald Trump a fascist? Experts, historians, and pundits have debated the question for months. One thing has been certain for a while now: He tweets like one. That’s why, last year, Gawker’s Ashley Feinberg created a Twitter bot that would post quotes from the writings and speeches of the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, but with all of them attributed to businessman and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. This morning, he retweeted that account.

In all fairness, how was Donald Trump supposed to know “ilduce2016” might be quoting Mussolini?